H-Diary: Mobile application for headache diary and remote patient monitoring

The initial monitoring of patients with headache is an essential part of ongoing patient safety. Usually, patients are asked to fill in traditional paper-based diaries or outcome measures (e.g., HIT-6 and MIDAS) on a regular basis to measure the impact of headache on a patient's life. However, within publicly funded health care systems such as the UK's National Health Service (NHS), long term monitoring in neurology clinics appears not to be possible for all patients with chronic headache due to the continued decline in funding over the past decade. Nowadays, there is scope to improve patient monitoring and safety in the headache clinic by employing mobile health (mhealth) technologies. The M-health application represents an intelligent solution and holds potential to allow specialists to monitor a larger number of patients than would be possible within the current service model. Mobile applications could replace traditional paper-based diaries and outcome measures and provide several advantages including improved monitoring of historical responses to therapies, improved recording of side effects and can be adapted to improve communication between patients and clinicians. We therefore developed a mobile application-based system to allow remote monitoring of patients with chronic headache.